Joy H. Calico is professor of musicology and chair of the Department of Musicology. Her scholarship focuses on interdisciplinary Cold War cultural politics, opera since 1900, and Arnold Schoenberg. Her current projects include a theory of twentieth- and twenty-first-century opera according to scene type built on Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (under contract with University of California Press), and a co-edited volume for OUP entitled Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900, forthcoming in 2026. She and Daniel Chua launched the California Studies in Global Musicology (CSGM) book series in 2024.
She is the author of two monographs published by California: Brecht at the Opera (2008; paperback 2019) and Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (2014; expanded Italian edition published in 2023 and Russian translation published in 2025). Calico has published articles and book chapters on Joan La Barbara, music encoding and pedagogy, atonal music and human flourishing, Olga Neuwirth, Kaija Saariaho, Helmut Lachenmann, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, Schoenberg and noise, and East German opera directors, among other things. Recent publications include a chapter theorizing dramaturgies of trauma and sound design in Chaya Czernowin’s Infinite Now for Contemporary Opera in Flux, edited by Yayoi Uno Everett (University of Michigan Press, 2024), and an essay for the book/CD release of Sivan Eldar’s opera Like Flesh, entitled “An Operatic Queering of Ecological Grief” (2025).
Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Radcliffe Institute, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Sacher Stiftung, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation, the DAAD, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. In winter term 2019 she was Gerstein Visiting Distinguished Professor at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto.
She is a member of the working team of the international Black Opera Research Network (BORN) and serves on the editorial board of its journal, Journal of Black Opera and Music Theatre (JBOM). She was on the Nashville Opera board for nearly a decade. Calico is former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society as well as a former Director-at-Large for the AMS board (2019-21). She was co-founder and coordinator of the Music and Sound Studies Network of the German Studies Association and served on the GSA’s board (2013-2016), during which time she was also Director of the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies at Vanderbilt University. She was on the faculty at Vanderbilt for twenty years before coming to UCLA in 2023.
